Summary

The aim of this project was to explore the world of street art and for the students to express their ideas in tags, paste-ups and murals.

To begin I showed the students some videos about street art, emphasising its relevance to freedom of expression, breaking out of the gallery and as a mouthpiece for young people. Then each student was given a 'wall', a piece of plywood 600x200 on which to experiment each week with different processes. The idea was that their designs would be layered on top of each other to reflect the way street art builds on itself (a concept called succession). The processes I introduced included tagging (repeating an alias or phrase in a personal font and style), paste-up (creating works on paper and sticking them onto a wall) and mural (using spray or poster pens to create backgrounds and imagery). I encouraged students to come up with original concepts that reflected their interests, ideas and messages for others. And along the way I introduced them to concepts such as succession, tag-up (only covering something with something better), scribble (the vandalism end of the street art spectrum) and cross pollination (collaborating or tagging with others). After 8 weeks the completed walls were photographed and I rendered the images (with artistic direction from the students) onto found photos of actual walls in the world. Conceptually its street art in the digital world, treating found images of walls on the internet as the public spaces on which to make digital street art.

In an unexpected twist around week 6, some students noticed three cubby houses in an area of the school grounds called Woodstock covered with chalk scribble by students in K to 2. Their discovery presented an opportunity for a real world project based extension.

With my help the students measured up the cubbies and designed a series of murals. Then together we submitted a proposal to the school offering to install the murals as a way of addressing the scribble problem and demonstrating to the younger students that "street art isn't scribble and scribble isn't street art". The school approved the proposal and the murals were installed by the students in the final week of term.

About Design School

Design School is a co-curricular creative arts program for students from years 3 to 6. It was launched in 2016 at Wenona School. Each term groups of 15 students embark on open ended process driven creative arts projects designed to nurture their artistry and self expression. Other examples include Architecture and Light & Shadow.